MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF

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PON the cover of the English translation of this young artist's journal is displayed Gladstone's judgment that it is "a book without a parallel." That is not very high praise, certainly; it may be said of many books which the judicious would "willingly let die"; and in this case the judicious will hope that a parallel work may be long denied to the taste that craves it. The book from cover to cover is distinctly unwholeIt has the merit of candor; its frankness is appalling. Yet one can not help suspecting the quality of that frankness. Did this young girl, who began at twelve, and for a dozen years-almost to the day of her death -poured into her journal her heterogenous and undigested thoughts, fancies and feelings with a view to publication and a hope of fame as a result of it-did she after all make as honest a record as she doubtless supposed herself to be doing? It will hardly seem so to one who has written much for publication.

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Such a one may justly enough distrust, although he can not altogether reject, the evidences of the text, which are necessarily studied and interpreted in the light of the text itself; but knowing something of the conditions of literary composition he will be slow to believe that the young diarist could at the same time remember and forget that she was writing to be read. Nor will it seem to him that his doubt if she put down all that came into her head is too hardy an assumption of knowledge of how Russian young women think and feel. Something doubtless must be allowed for individual character and disposition in this case as in another, but then, too, one must be permitted to remember that even a Russian young woman of more or less consuming self-consciousness and sex-consciousness is merely human, belonging to the race which daily thanks its Maker for not putting windows in breasts. Even a Russian maiden with a private method of estimating her intellectual importance who should write all her thoughts would probably be invited to stay her steps toward the Temple of Fame long enough to make acquaintance of the police.

But if the diarist has not written down all

her thoughts and feelings, how can the reader be quite sure that she has accurately reported those of them that she professes to give?— how that they are not afterthoughts, some of them, at least, evolved in the process of revision for the press? I do not know if upon this point there is any other than internal evidence and the probabilities; my reading in the somewhat raw and raucous literature of the subject has not been quite exhaustive. The internal evidence and the probabilities point pretty plainly to revision of the text, for which the reader might have been more grateful if it had been more thoroughly made. Much of the book, in truth, might advantageously have been revised out of existence-much of what is left, I mean.

Marie Bashkirtseff was born in 1860 and died of consumption in 1884. She was given a good education and knew some of the advantages of travel. Having a love of art— which she mistook for ability to produce works of art she became a painter and by dint of study under the spur of vanity performed some fairly creditable work which, while the fashion of reading her journal was "on," commanded fair prices and brought gladness and sunshine into the homes of good

Americans of long purses and short schooling. She was perhaps rather more than less successful in painting than in expounding the excellences of the paintings of others. In such criticism as she gives us in her journal one does not detect any understanding. "This is not art; it is Nature herself"; "the face is real; it is flesh and blood"-such judgments as these are sprinkled all through the book, recalling the dear old familiar jargon of the "dramatic critics" of the newspapers; "Jonesmith was no longer himself but Hamlet"; "Brown-Robinson completely identified himself with his rôle, and it was Julius Cæsar himself that we saw before our eyes." The crudest and most meaningless form of art criticism is to declare the representation the thing represented, and poor Marie Bashkirtseff seldom goes further in accounting for her adoration of the works of such masters as Bastien-Lepage, Corot and Duran.

There must have been something engaging in the girl, for she seems to have acquired the friendship of such men, and to have retained it. Her account of those last days when she and Bastien-Lepage-each with a leg in the grave, like a caught fox dragging

its trap-caused themselves to be brought together to compare the ravages of their disorders in silence is pathetic with the pathos of the morgue. One would rather have been spared it. It leaves a bad taste in the memory and fitly concludes a book which is morbid, hysterical and unpleasant beyond anything of its kind in literature-" a book without a parallel." It enforces and illustrates a useful truth: that when suffering from internal disorders one can not afford to turn oneself inside out as an exercise in literary calisthenics.

1887.